Australian Government Linked Data Working Group

The Australian Government Linked Data Working Group is an informal, advisory working group within Australia government, self-tasked "to meet the Linked Data challenges facing the Australian government". The Group was established in August 2012 and operates with monthly or more regular meetings.

Membership
Membership of the group is not heavily restricted and is open to any member of Australian government (any level). Private sector individuals may attend meetings as guests.

Currently (January, 2020) there is regular attendance of members of the following Australian government departments:


 * Australian Bureau of Statistics
 * Australian National University
 * CSIRO
 * Department of Finance
 * Department of Human Services
 * Digital Transformation Agency
 * Geoscience Australia
 * National Archives of Australia
 * Queensland's Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy (primarily the Geological Survey of Queensland)

For 2020 - 2022, the co-chairs of the Group are Armin Haller (ANU), Nataliya Katsman (Tas. State Growth), Nicholas Car (ANU) & John Machin (Finance)

For 2019/2020, the co-chairs of the Group were Armin Haller (ANU), Brigette Metzler (DHS), Nicholas Car (QDNRME) & John Machin (Finance)

Activities
The Group both conducts informal advice on Linked Data matters to interested members of Australian government and provides technical expertise for information requests such as the recent Data Availability and Use inquiry (see the Group's Submission 46 ). The Group regularly attends Australian conferences and workshops in the areas of eLearning and data, for example the eResearch Australasia Conference series where they presented on "collaborating across agencies to work together on systems, vocabularies, ontologies and datasets".

The group also operates some Linked Data systems, such as a Persistent URI service (see the Group's description of the system and governance), and assists Australian government with Linked Data asset publication. Registers of Linked Data assets published with assistance from the group are visible online at:


 * AGLDWG 'def' register – definitional items (taxonomies/vocabularies/classification schema & ontologies)
 * AGLDWG 'datasets' register – Linked Data datasets

To date (January, 2020) several significant data models for Australian government, such as the Australian Government Records Interoperability Framework (AGRIF) have been published via the Group's resources. See AGRIF via its persistent web address:


 * http://linked.data.gov.au/def/agrif